Category: Uncategorized

Doubts About the Army’s Recruitment Numbers

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Is the Army using a shell game to give a false impression of its recruiting success?

That’s a dangerous accusation, but a critical issue. In light of President Obama’s promise on the campaign trail to increase the end-strength of the military by 92,000 troops (65,000 for the Army alone), the Army’s numbers should accurately reflect how they’re doing.

Last week, the Pentagon issued a press release stating the Army had not only met but actually exceeded its recruiting goals for FY2009. Army Maj. Gen. Donald Campbell thumped his chest in the Washington Post soon thereafter, crediting the Army’s number of recruiters on the ground as a critical component of its success.

Unfortunately, the Army is using some creative accounting to bring about that success. To meet its goals, the Army simply lowered them — by ten thousand fewer new recruits in 2009 (vs. 2008) and ten thousand fewer re-enlistments. Or, as Fred Kaplan notes in Slate:

[T]he Army this year lowered not only the recruitment goal but the retention goal too, from 65,000 in 2008 to 55,000 in 2009. And it actually held on to fewer soldiers than it did in either of the last two years (68,000 in 2009, compared with 72,000 in 2008 and 69,000 in 2007).

So here is the situation. The secretary of defense ordered, and Congress authorized, an expansion in the size of the Army. But the Army reduced the recruitment goal — and reduced the retention goal. The size of the Army is in fact shrinking. It may look as if it’s growing — the Pentagon report gives the impression it’s growing — but it’s growing only in comparison with the officially set goals.

For Army “recruitniks” (a term usually applied to my friends’ insatiable desire to follow Charlie Weis’ efforts to cajole 18-year-old kids to play college football at Notre Dame), the situation comes as little surprise. In an excellent exposé in September, the National Journal made two key points about the Army’s recruits:

Never before has the Army had so many soldiers with so much experience; never before have so many soldiers been so exhausted.

The article concludes:

Today’s Army may be equal to the U.S. population in its demographic representation, but it is also separate.

And it is getting more so all the time. That reduces the chance that declining public support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cause Army morale to collapse, as it did in Vietnam. Still, it raises a different danger. “I don’t think they’re going to get burned out,” said retired Col. Patrick Lang, a Vietnam veteran. “But they’re going to get harder and harder, and more detached from the values of civilian society.”

Unless the military puts out an honest assessment of where its recruiting is, none of these problems will be fixed any time soon.

Why Baucus May Have Played It Right

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

From Roll Call today comes the latest episode in the tired series known as The Party of “No”:

Senate Republicans, acknowledging they lack the votes to block a health care reform bill outright, have implemented a comprehensive political strategy to delay, define and derail.

With Democratic leaders and White House officials holed up in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office negotiating a final bill, Republicans are demanding a deceleration of the process and moving to define whatever plan that emerges as a combination of Medicare cuts, tax increases, higher insurance premiums and rising overall costs.

Such legislative nihilism from the GOP isn’t new. What’s striking, however, is how little sting their charges have. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY.) complains that Democrats are trying to rush the bill through without GOP feedback, it rings hollow.

Perhaps the credit for that should go to Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT). Many progressives chafed at Baucus’s insistence on a plodding, methodical process that made a good-faith effort to include moderate and conservative input. The finance committee’s deliberations may have seemed painstakingly slow, but it did yield a Republican supporter — Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — and a bill that, whatever one thought of it, could not be labeled a rushed and partisan product. In other words, Baucus’s process has, to some extent, inoculated the reform effort from Republican charges that the process hasn’t been deliberative or bipartisan enough.

We’ve seen this before, of course. In the negotiations over the stimulus bill, President Obama came under fire for bending over backwards to reach out to Republicans, as critics pointed out that few, if any, would jump aboard. Obama probably knew this, but also knew that the process, and public perceptions of it, matter. In the end, the administration got the stimulus bill it wanted with some Republican support. Moreover, Obama did it while burnishing his credentials as a pragmatic problem-solver and leaving Republicans looking like unreasonable obstructionists. The health reform debate seems like it’s following the same contours. In retrospect, Baucus may have played this right all along.

“Green Shoots” on Climate Change?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With the entire U.S. political world engaged in handicapping the likely outcome of the health care reform debate, while others focus on the Obama administration’s impending decision on strategy and troop levels for Afghanistan, there hasn’t been much attention paid outside advocacy groups to prospects for action on climate change legislation (passed, as you might recall, by the House during the summer).

The general prognosis has been pretty negative, in part because of the extreme difficulty encountered in getting the revised Waxman-Markey legislation through the House (requiring compromises that left a lot of advocates cold or lukewarm), and in part because the Senate was so absorbed with health reform.

But last weekend the leading Senate climate change legislation advocate, John Kerry, threw a change-up that will at the very least require a recalibration of expectations, by signing onto a New York Times op-edwith Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham offering a new “deal”: combining a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions with provisions liberalizing offshore oil drilling and relaxing regulations on nuclear power development.

The op-ed is worth reading in its entirety, but aside from offering conservatives the carrot of more U.S. oil and nuclear power, it also bluntly threatens the stick of unileratal action on climate change by the Obama administration:

Failure to act comes with another cost. If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations. Imposed regulations are likely to be tougher and they certainly will not include the job protections and investment incentives we are proposing.

The message to those who have stalled for years is clear: killing a Senate bill is not success; indeed, given the threat of agency regulation, those who have been content to make the legislative process grind to a halt would later come running to Congress in a panic to secure the kinds of incentives and investments we can pass today. Industry needs the certainty that comes with Congressional action.

This threat may actually be welcomed by hard-core Republican pols who would lick their chops at the idea of “bureaucrats” end-running Congress to set up a cap-and-trade system, but not by those industries that would actually be affected, particularly since the business community is already divided on the issue.

The op-ed also discusses the national security case for action on climate change, and as Brad Plumer at The Vine notes, this argument polls well, has some appeal to conservatives, and also explains why Foreign Relations Committee chairman Kerry has for the moment displaced Barbara Boxer of CA as the “face” of the climate change initiative in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver goes through the Senate membership and tries to assess which specific senators might be moved by a new bipartisan “deal” on climate change:

So what does this get the Democrats? It gets them Linsday Graham’s vote, and possibly Lisa Murkowski’s. It takes Mark Begich from a leaner to a likely yes. It might encourage Mary Landrieu, and possibly George LeMieux of Florida, to look more sympathetically at the bill. Then there are a whole host of more remote possibilities: Isakson of Georgia, and perhaps Cochran and Wicker of Mississippi or Burr of North Carolina; none of those votes are likely, but they become more plausible with offshore drilling in place. Overall, it seems to be worth something like 2-4 votes at the margin.

That would give the Kerry-Graham bill a fighting chance, especially if an additional vote or two — possibly John McCain’s — can also be picked up as a result of the nuclear energy compromise. Of course, that’s assuming that no liberals would rebel against the new provisions, but the opposition to both offshore drilling and nuclear energy seems to be fairly soft in the liberal caucus.

On this last point, it’s worth noting that Dave Roberts of Grist, a highly credible warrior for action on climate change, adjudges the concessionson oil and nuclear energy “an affordable price [to pay] for the benefits of passing a bill.”

If nothing else, Kerry’s gambit has shuffled the deck, complicated Republican claims that Democrats are uninterested in genuine bipartisanship, and offered a sign of potential progress in advance of international climate change negotiations in December. All in all, it’s a good example of strategic audacity on an extraordinarily wonky issue, and well worth watching.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Don’t Assume Too Much About Afghanistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

My high school homeroom teacher, Mr. Grescovich, had some twenty homemade signs up in his classroom that extolled various life lessons. They were all home-made; and therein lay their charm. Since I went to what was then an all-boys school, Mr. G. got away with some mild profanity with which the Jesuits took no issue.

My favorite was, “When you ASSUME, you make an ‘ASS’ out of ‘U’ and ‘ME'”.

Such is today’s debate on Afghanistan. Plenty of assumptions are flying around, and the intelligentsia class is debating which to follow, and which to discount.

Richard Haass, the respected President of the Council on Foreign Relations, made a dangerous one over the weekend in a Washington Post editorial:

Al-Qaeda does not require Afghan real estate to constitute a regional or global threat. Terrorists gravitate to areas of least resistance; if they cannot use Afghanistan, they will use countries such as Yemen or Somalia, as in fact they already are.

It’s a mistake to assume that al Qaeda – the only group that ever had both the intent and capability of conducting a massive attack against the United States – has perfect mobility to just pick up and move from the AF/PAK border region to Somalia, Yemen, or Kalamazoo. It’s not that easy.

Al Qaeda is ensconced in that region and will remain so. It’s true that the group is much weakened from previous incarnations due to the ongoing NATO/Afghan offensive. But weakness doesn’t increase mobility: if faced with the choice of: a) riding out the counterinsurgency while hoping to reconstitute itself in Afghanistan/Pakistan after a delay, and b) picking up and moving to Africa or the Saudi peninsula, then it isn’t even close.

In fact, the second option simply isn’t possible. Even if al Qaeda is limited to some 100 full-time fighters, I’ve got a crisp $20 bill that says a good percentage would be captured trying to cross any significant international border (excluding, of course, the one between Afghanistan and Pakistan). Do you think UBL has a passport? Do you think he wants one?

What’s more, a hunk of usable real estate is a critical component to preparing a massive terrorist attack against the United States. While the London and Madrid bombings required nothing more than a few apartments in Leeds and Leganes respectively, the scale and complexity of those attacks – quite small in comparison to 9/11 – mirrored their planning environments. Furthermore, those groups had neither the intent nor capability to attack the United States.

But al Qaeda used to, and can again under the right circumstances. Free from the watchful eye of a competent local security service and protected under the veil of an amicable local government, a plot can be planned and rehearsed to increase its complexity, scale, and range by several orders of magnitude.

Therefore, Afghan real estate is a highly valuable commodity. And we need to permanently deny Al Qaeda access to it.

Blocking Out the Nobel Noise

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

According to Gallup’s daily tracking poll, President Obama’s job approval rating has seen a nice little bounce in the wake of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement last Friday. From a term-low 50% approval rating a week ago, Obama’s rating now sits at 56%. That uptick certainly seems to defy the conventional wisdom among the chattering classes about Obama’s victory. The responses from the commentariat ran from frothing-at-the-mouth outrage from the usual conservative suspects to slightly abashed cheers from the president’s supporters. But hardly anyone saw the award as an unalloyed good.

But as we have learned repeatedly over the years, what passes for beltway CW hardly applies to the rest of the country. When you extricate yourself from the myopic maelstrom that is Washington punditry, you realize that most Americans actually have common-sense views that aren’t infected by who-up-who’s-down overanalysis. For many Americans, a sitting president winning the Nobel Peace Prize is, in fact, an unapologetically good thing. Obama, who has displayed an impressive ability to disregard the noise of cable and commentary, again showed sound instincts, accepting the award with humility and as a call to action, rather than turning down the prize, as some on both right and left urged. (As if this no-nonsense president would even consider making such a melodramatic gesture.)

Breaking down the Gallup numbers further, it appears that the bump has come strictly from Independents (up nine points) and Republicans (up eight). (Democratic numbers did not change.) This might suggest, as Gallup warns, that the bounce could be fleeting. But it also tells us that even with the right-wing explosion about the award, those most likely to be swayed had their own ideas. It affirms what the Obama campaign bet on during the campaign: When it comes to public opinion, Americans are pretty good about blocking out the media narrative du jour.

Why Obama’s Nobel Win Is a Good Thing

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s decision to bestow this year’s award on President Obama is both an endorsement and a challenge.

The prize is an endorsement of Obama’s idea of what America should be. We may be the world’s strongest power, but America should have the strength to listen and lead, not order and ignore. Obama’s America listens as much as it speaks, it projects specific and achievable long-term goals for world peace, and it isn’t afraid to tell friends and enemies alike that peace is achievable but only by making unpopular choices. More than empty words, Obama’s engagement is buttressed by a hard-nosed realism that is interested in acting as much as talking.

Would President Obama have won if he wasn’t immediately preceded by George W. Bush? Likely not — the differences in their ideologies, temperament, and interpretation of American power would probably not have been enough if the contrast hadn’t been sharply juxtaposed by historical proximity. But then again, would an African-American Democrat with little governing experience have been elected president without that contrast?

The prize is also a challenge, both to Obama and to the international community. Obama was inaugurated only two weeks before nominations for the prize were closed, suggesting that it was Obama’s idealistic hope on the campaign trail that won him consideration at the outset. His first months in office have inspired billions, but the next three years pose the challenge of turning hope into results.

His international partners have likewise been challenged. With Obama buoyed by the prestige of the prize, the burden to work for peace has shifted to them. It would normally be difficult to say no to the world’s most popular leader. How tougher would it be now that he’s won the Nobel Peace Prize?

Are the States Ready To Undertake Health Care Reform?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the U.S. Senate prepares for floor action on health care reform, there’s a sudden profusion of schemes that seek a compromise on the key “public option” question by giving states a lot of leeway. Tom Carper is floating a state “opt-in” approach. Others are talking about a state “opt-out” system. The Finance Committee has already adopted Maria Cantwell’s proposal to let states use federal subsidy funds to cover a majority of the uninsured as they see fit. And the original Baucus markup vehicle included Ron Wyden’s proposal to let states do all sorts of “experimentation” with federal funds.

The political value of these approaches is pretty obvious: by giving states flexibility on the key questions surrounding the public option debate, health reform proponents hope to give shaky Democrats and maybe a Republican or two an avenue to get out of the way of health reform while accomodating home-state pressure from health insurers and/or providers.

This makes abundant sense in Washington. But the question must be asked: are the states ready to get into the driver’s seat on the basic design of health care systems, public and private, within their borders?

I raise the question not because of any particular doubts about the competence of states on health care policy. But it’s important to understand that these state-based approaches to national health reform will transfer much of the yelling and screaming and lobbying we’ve seen, along with the complex issues that have to be resolved, right into the center of state politics, just in time for the 2010 elections.

Most of the fears about health reform that state officials have expressedup until now have, understandably enough, focused on the fiscal impact of Medicaid mandates. But governors and legislators, not to mention candidates for state offices, may soon be grappling with the entire range of controversial health care issues. They better get ready, and their representatives in Washington better start talking to them.

This item is cross-posted at The New Republic.

Code Pink Reconsiders Stance on Afghanistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Code Pink: warmongers?

Hardly, but don’t automatically assume you know this anti-war women’s group position on Afghanistan. You may remember the Pink-sters disrupting Hill hearings on Iraq War funding and on campus at Berkeley protesting a Marine Corps recruiting station.

But when it comes to Kabul, you may be surprised. The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that Code Pink is “rethinking” its position on Afghanistan. Following a fact-finding visit to Afghanistan, co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, found – well – some facts that convinced them to change their tune. Says Benjamin:

“That’s where we have opened ourselves, being here, to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the US troops left the country, would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider [our stance].”

Protecting Afghans from the Taliban is precisely what General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan is designed to do. In the process, the US aims to train up to 200,000 more members of the Afghan security forces to extend that veil of protection more permanently, and without US assistance. To do it effectively, he needs more troops because by sending more troops, there will hopefully be less war.

They Like Us! They Really Like Us!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

After Barack Obama’s victory last November, there were stories about how the election shifted international perceptions of America. It turns out we weren’t just imagining it. Coming on the heels of the Olympic disappointment — which conservatives have tried to spin as a referendum on Obama’s global appeal — a new poll from GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media finds that the Obama effect is, in fact, real and impressive.

According to the firm’s new Nation Brands Index (NBI), the U.S. is now the most admired country in the world, jumping to the top spot from its seventh-place finish in last year’s poll. Simon Anholt, the founder of NBI, said, “What’s really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States for 2009.”

The survey asked 20,000 people in 20 countries around the globe to rate nations in a range of categories, including culture, governance, people, and exports. The U.S. was followed by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan. On the other end of the list, Angola finished at #49 and Iran is at #50.

The results affirm the pride that many Americans felt about their country following Obama’s win last year. It also shows that Obama’s humbler, progressive brand of leadership is having its desired effect. The target of resentful, sidelong glances from the rest of the world under the Bush administration, America seems to have reclaimed its position as an admired exemplar. Renewed trust and popularity don’t mean that Obama will win every diplomatic battle, but it certainly puts us in a better position than where we were when the neocons were running the place.

The Debates We Are Not Having on Iran

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Michael Crowley expresses shock over a new Pew poll finding that 61% of Americans would favor military action to prevent Iranian development of nuclear weapons if other options fail.

I’m less shocked.  In the run-up to the Iraq War, the belief that Saddam Hussein had developed or was rapidly developing WMD, including nuclear weapons, was a pretty important factor in the robust majorities that favored military action.  And the discovery that he actually didn’t have WMD helped turn Americans against the war once his regime had been toppled.  Since evidence of an Iranian nuclear program is far better established, it’s not that shocking that Americans would react now as they did in 2002 and 2003.

But the other big thing that obviously turned Americans against the Iraq War was the immense cost and difficulty of consolidating the initial military victory.  In the Pew poll, respondents are asked if they favor “military action.”  It’s entirely possible that many of those answering “yes” are thinking in terms of some “surgical strike” that will destroy the nuclear program without a wider war.  Should negotiations and/or sanctions fail and we are actually contemplating military conflict with Iran, it will more than likely become apparent that eliminating Iran’s nuclear program will require an actual ground war aimed at regime change.  It’s at that point when the lessons of Iraq will truly begin to sink in, and support for “military action” will go down.  But we haven’t had that debate yet.

What the Pew poll does show is that Americans don’t seem to buy the argument that a nuclear Iran is deterrable (by the United States or by Israel), just as the regimes of Stalin and Mao–and for that matter, Hitler, who had stockpiles of chemical weapons he didn’t dare to use–were deterrable.  Perhaps that means that Americans, like many Israelis, view the current Iranian regime as uniquely dangerous, or at least frighteningly irrational, and capable of inviting unimaginable casualities in a nuclear exchange with Israel or the U.S.   Or perhaps they simply think a nuclear Iran would permanently destabilize the world’s most fragile region.  But deterrance is inevitably a matter of calculated risks.  Had it been possible during the Cold War to “take out” the Soviet Union’s or China’s nuclear capacity without a calamitous war, a majority of Americans would have supported doing just that.  Once the costs and risks of war with Iran are fully aired and debated, some Americans now favoring “military action” may decide that Iran is deterrable after all.

The fact remains that we haven’t yet had the full debate that will ultimately shape U.S. policy towards Iran.  In the meantime, it’s fine by me if Tehran reads about this Pew poll and reconsiders its current drive for nukes.

This item was crossposted at The New Republic.

A Way Forward on Immigration

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Since November 2008, I have been participating in roundtable discussions on immigration policy with a group of academics, policy analysts, community leaders, and former government officials brought together by the Brookings Institution and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. The participants ranged across the political spectrum and had different perspectives on immigration. But over the course of 10 months, we were able to converge on a set of broad recommendations that we believe can win political support and bring about long-delayed reform in immigration policy.

Below are some of the report’s most noteworthy proposals:

  • It unequivocally sets a goal of dramatic reduction in illegal immigration, and creates a mechanism to achieve that.
  • It offers a carefully synchronized plan for stricter enforcement in workplace. It would establish a mandatory verification system and legalization regime simultaneously. This “trust but verify” approach is intended to avoid a repeat of what happened after the last major reform in 1986: there was legalization but not a sustained effort to identify undocumented workers, so that there was no effective deterrent against further illegal immigration.
  • It begins to shift the basis on which immigrants are admitted from reunification of extended families to skills, and increases visas for skilled immigrants.
  • It replaces temporary work visas with provisional, five-year ones. The point is to require that foreign workers go home after five years or get on track for legal permanent resident status.
  • It calls for an immigration commission that would make specific recommendations to Congress on how many immigrants to admit. It’s an action-forcing mechanism: Congress would have to adopt, amend, or replace the recommendations within a set period of time.
  • It puts a new office in the White House to oversee efforts to assimilate new Americans.
  • It acknowledges the special case of Mexico as by far the biggest source of illegal immigrants, and calls for new ways to promote regional cooperation on immigration, guns, and drugs.

To read the report, click here.

Fighting Terrorism With Cooler Heads: The Zazi Case

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Perhaps you’ve heard something about the case of Najibullah Zazi, the 24-year-old Afghan immigrant arrested in Colorado under suspicion of nearing the “execution phase” of a terrorist plot, purportedly against a target in New York City.

Then again, maybe you haven’t.

And that, my friends, isn’t a terrible thing. Zazi’s case illustrates the Obama administration’s shifting approach to protecting the country in a relatively discreet manner that doesn’t score political points with every arrest:

 

“The Zazi case was the first test of this administration being able to successfully uncover and deal with this type of threat in the United States,” a senior administration official said. “It demonstrated that we were able to successfully neutralize this threat, and to have insight into it, with existing statutory authorities, with the system as it currently operates.”

It’s also an approach that stands a better chance securing convictions of the arrested suspects. Ever heard this old joke: What does F.B.I. stand for? Famous But Incompetent.

That’s starting to change. It looks like the Bureau is a little less Famous And More Competent: Instead of preemptively arresting Zazi before getting the (court admissible) goods, the FBI has shown a more patient, discerning attitude in tracking him. They didn’t just jump in and arrest him the first day he popped on the radar, as they would have years hence. Rather, they watched him for several weeks, and as a result, the Bureau has better evidence of his movements, contacts, and terrorist activities.

And best of all:

 

With Zazi’s arrest, administration officials said they had a renewed sense of confidence that they could approach security threats in a new way. “The system probably worked the way it did before, but we made a conscious decision not to have a big press conference” about Zazi’s arrest, a senior official said. [emphasis mine]

We’re all safer and less paranoid because of it.

This looks like a trend. Back in May, the FBI arrested an unrelated cell of anti-Semities in Queens that looked to be on the verge of conducting attacks against Jewish targets in New York. Here too, the Bureau patiently waited to collect mounds of evidence, and as a result had better information to build a real court case.

Why the shift? Well, I’d like to take all the credit for this paper I wrote last year called “Getting Intelligence Reform Right”, but I’m not sure ALL the kudos go to lil’ ol’ me:

 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — the agency charged with collecting intelligence on al Qaeda (and similar groups) within U.S. borders — remains mired in an organizational culture focused mainly on throwing bad guys in jail rather than preventing terrorist attacks in the first place. To a layman, the difference may seem inconsequential, but it drastically impedes the FBI from completing its counterterrorism mission.

As an aside, I’d like to make a final note in the wake of the Guantanamo debate. Congress just passed a non-binding resolution saying they didn’t want to dangerous inmates of Guantanamo to be transferred to detention facilities within the US. But Najibullah Zazi is as dangerous – if not moreso – than just about anyone housed in GTMO. Arrested in Colorado, Zazi will be tried and imprisoned on American soil.

So why can’t we do that with the GTMO detainees again? Paging Dr. Backbone … Dr. Backbone… you’re wanted on the House floor.

GOP’s Great White Hopes — Now or Later

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Like a lot of folks, I’ve expressed worries about the likelihood that older white voters will represent a disproportionate share of the electorate in the 2010 midterm elections, creating an unearned GOP advantage. In his latest column, Ron Brownstein meditates on that possibility, but also points out that a Republican message tailored to older white voters could come back to haunt the GOP in 2012:

In midterm elections, the electorate tends to be whiter and older than in presidential elections. ABC polling director Gary Langer has calculated that since 1992 seniors have cast 19 percent of the vote in midterm elections, compared with just 15 percent in presidential years. That difference contributed to the 1994 landslide that swept the GOP into control of both the House and Senate. Seniors had cast just 13 percent of the vote in Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, but that figure spiked to nearly 19 percent two years later, with voting by the young people who had bolstered Clinton falling off sharply….

In 2008, Obama won the votes of just 40 percent of whites over age 65 (compared with 54 percent of whites under 30). All surveys show that white seniors remain the most resistant to Obama’s health care agenda and the most skeptical of him overall. In the nonpartisan Pew Research Center’s most recent poll, Obama’s approval rating among elderly whites stood at just 39 percent. Surveying all of these numbers, veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres says that the Republican margin among white seniors could “easily expand to 25 points” in 2010.

Brownstein also notes, however, that the general assumption of low voting in midterms by minorities is based on mixed evidence. Minority voters actually represented a higher share of the electorate in 1994 and 1998 than in the presidential years of 1992 and 1996. These voters did, however, decline slightly as a percentage of the electorate in 2002 and 2006 as compared to 2000 and 2004. Moreover, the bar is higher in 2010 given the strong minority turnout in 2008. A lot will depend on what happens between now and then, and perhaps on the extent to which Republicans are perceived as playing on white racial or cultural fears.

After 2010, though, any Republican focus on older white voters isn’t likely to pay dividends:

In the 2012 presidential election, the young and minority voters central to Obama’s coalition are likely to return in large numbers. The risk to the GOP is that a strong 2010 showing based on a conservative appeal to apprehensive older whites will discourage it from reconsidering whether its message is too narrow to attract those rapidly growing groups.

Even if, says Brownstein, the share of the electorate for minority voters drops from 2008’s twenty-five percent to twenty percent in 2010, it’s like to rise to near thirty percent in 2012. It’s at that point that any Great White Hopes for the GOP could really begin to backfire.

Polls: National Security at Stake in Afghanistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s no secret that Democrats are uneasy with sending more troops to Afghanistan.

But here’s something I found rather interesting – with or without troops, all Americans – Dems included – understand why we’re there, and their preference is to keep the country safe from another terrorist attack.

Here are some numbers:

A late September USAToday/Gallup poll says 50 percent of all Americans oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan (a number supported by just about every other poll), the figure is even higher amongst Democrats—62 percent.

But more importantly, all Americans place a premium on securing the country. Though not a majority, more Americans (47 percent) believe we are doing “the right thing” in Afghanistan than those (42 percent) who believe we shouldn’t be involved, according a late September New York Times/CBSNews poll.

Furthermore, 76 percent (including 76 percent of Democrats), according to a Pew Research Center poll, believe that if the Taliban took over Afghanistan again, it would constitute a “major threat” to American security. This is an important point for progressives, who should acknowledge that the Taliban made itself America’s sworn enemy when it gave shelter to al Qaeda in the first place, over the repeated protests and ineffectual warnings of the Clinton administration.

Finally, President Obama’s goals are sinking in with the country: a combined 72 percent, according to New York Times/CBSNews, believe the goal in Afghanistan is to defeat the Taliban and/or eliminate terrorism.

Americans may not like the strategy, but they know we’re in Afghanistan to keep America safe. Democrats should support the goal, not the strategy.

A Republican Starts Making Sense

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Maybe Bobby Jindal is a new kind of Republican after all.

Republicans had high hopes for the Louisiana Governor, whose brains, youth and conspicuous ethnicity (his family is from India) marked him as conservatives’ answer to Barack Obama. That’s why they chose Jindal to gave his party’s response to Obama’s first address to Congress last January.

But the nationally televised speech bombed. Jindal served up GOP boilerplate rather than fresh ideas, and his delivery was off-kilter to boot. So much, it seemed, for the GOP’s Great Not-So-White Hope.

But botched speeches aren’t always fatal. Just ask Bill Clinton, whose long-winded keynote address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention was also seen as aborting a promising political career.

And Jindal, a serious wonk who ran Louisiana’s Medicare program while still in his 20s, did something rare for a Republican these days: he started making sense. Specifically, he urged Congressional Republicans to drop their purely obstructionist stance and work with the White House to pass a bipartisan health reform.

“I think now is the perfect time to pivot and say, not only here’s what we’re against, and not only here’s how we’re going to contrast ourselves, but here’s what we’re for,” Jindal told Politico. He also asserted that Republicans offer nothing positive on health reform “to our peril and the nation’s peril.”

That’s an important point. Many Republicans seem to think that carpetbombing “Obamacare” without offering a coherent alternative is politically cost-free. After all, polls show falling support for Obama’s plan to revamp health care, especially among seniors and independents.

Some progressives apparently agree that Republicans can lie outrageously and get away with it. Especially among elites, the plummeting poll numbers confirm an unflattering view of Americans as a bovine mass easily stampeded by right-wing buzzphrases – “socialism,” “death panels,” “the death tax” and the like.

Well, there’s also evidence that many Americans are watching the GOP’s antics, and don’t like what they see. By wide margins, (52-27 in this NYT-CBS poll) the public still thinks Obama has better ideas on health care than Congressional Republicans. According to Democracy Corps, a solid majority believes Republicans “are more interested in partisan politics than solving the country’s problems.”

The GOP’s nattering negativism, in other words, may be undermining public confidence in Obama’s ability to revamp the health care system, but it’s also reinforcing the party’s well-earned reputation as being unfit to govern.

So maybe Jindal is on to something. And progressives ought to have at least as much faith as he seems to in the public’s ability to distinguish serious arguments about health reform from right-wing agitprop and paranoia.